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Crab Meat, American
Make a smooth hash with six shallots, the red part of a medium carrot, one saltspoon thyme, one bay leaf, a half bean garlic, two branches parsley and one branch chervil. Place in a frying pan with a tablespoon butter, and lightly brown for five minutes, pour in a gill claret, then let reduce five minutes. Add one and a half pounds very fresh crab-meat flakes, one and a half gills tomato sauce, a tablespoon brandy, half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and let slowly cook twenty minutes, gently mixing once in a while, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A French sauce américaine in miniature, built on an aromatic hash rather than shells. The measurements are pre-standard but all translate cleanly.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is 1/2 cup, so the claret is 1/2 cup and the tomato sauce 3/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- "Half bean garlic"A clove, not a head — half a clove, finely minced. The garlic is a background note here, subordinate to the shallots.
- The hash"Smooth hash" means chopped very fine, close to a paste; a food processor does it in seconds. The bay leaf and thyme are better left whole and fished out than pulverised into the mixture.
- Don't cook the crab twenty minutesCrab meat sold today is already cooked. Twenty minutes of simmering shreds it and turns it stringy. Reduce the aromatic base, wine and tomato sauce to a thick sauce first, then fold in the crab and warm it through for three or four minutes.
- Crab meatAbout 1 1/2 lb of lump or backfin picked crab. Handle it gently and fold rather than stir, or the flakes break down into paste.
- Tomato sauceIn period cookery of this kind this generally means a cooked, seasoned tomato sauce, not tinned pizza sauce or ketchup. Passata reduced with a little butter, or a plain tomato coulis, is closest.
- Heat levelOne saltspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg, so about 1/4 teaspoon each — assertive but not fiery. Add the cayenne in stages if working with a hot batch.
- YieldServes four as a first course, three as a light main. Rice, toast or puff-pastry shells absorb the sauce well.
The name is misleading to modern eyes: "American" in a professional kitchen of this era pointed not at the United States but at the French treatment à l'américaine — shellfish with shallot, tomato, white wine or brandy, and cayenne, generally traced to Parisian restaurant cooking of the 1860s and long argued over as a corruption of à l'armoricaine, after Brittany. Here that formula, normally applied to lobster split in its shell, is transposed onto picked crab meat, which was widely available along the American Atlantic coast. The aromatic base — shallot, carrot, thyme, bay, parsley, chervil chopped to a paste and sweated in butter — is handled in the French manner, though it is not a mirepoix proper; the chervil is a good marker of the period, a standard restaurant herb then that has largely dropped out of English-language home cooking since.